For his first solo exhibition in a gallery, this young graduate (2010) from National School of Fine Arts of Paris presents a two parts scenography (1) with works combining mathematics, geometry and the Natural. Through a study of minerals, luminous phenomena or geometrical theories, the artist establishes a link between different elements extracted from nature in order to incorporate them in a coherent and rationalised thought of the representation.

Agartha, the title of the exhibition, originates in the theory that the Earth is hollow and contains an ordered system with its own sun. This term refers to an unreachable space where the complete knowledge would lie. This artistic hypothesis is equally connected with scientific theories than poetic approaches or sci-fi novels, like Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne. This name, Agartha, of a legendary underground realm, allows to establish a link between landscape, rock, minerals and different mathematical theories in order to create a complete rationalisation of elements. The hollow moutain, the earth’s crust, the imagination and the symbols form an autonomous and total world.

Therefore, these processes, long fantasized, create an immaterial link between our atmosphere and the cosmos. Similar to luminous vortexes, his works associate sources of celestial and organic lights (coral, fireflies...) in order to recreate the best the order of the Natural.

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(1) The first part is exhibited on the ground floor in September, and the second part on the second floor in October, following two complementary but different proposals in the choice of exhibited works.

This exhibition is presented at the same time as Paola de Pietri’s exhibition.

Paola de Pietri Paola de Pietri - Questa Pianura

Sep 3 - 26, 2015 Reception: Thu Sep 3 6pm - 9pm

Paola de Pietri is a major figure in Italian photography. For this unpublished series, she roamed through this wide plain of her childhood.

Paola de Pietri is a major figure in Italian photography. Apart from her recent collaborations to Fotografia Europea de Reggio Emilia and to big exhibitions of Linea di Confine, for which she realized several territorial commissions, Paola de Pietri has participated these past decades to plenty of exhibitions under the aegis of the most important Italian and European institutions dedicated to photography and contemporary art. She has been awarded the prestigious Albert Renger- Patzch Prize in 2009 for her series To Face, and has benefited from several monographic exhibitions, one of whom in MAXXI in Roma. Lately in France, she has been exhibited in the Photographic Center of Ile-de-France (CPIF) in Pontault-Combault and in Musée de l’Image in Epinal.

In parallel with her last series, Istanbul New Stories - which addresses the transformations in Istanbul suburbs - and To Face - revealing the stigmata of the First World War on the Italian Alps’ landscapes - Paola de Pietri again focused on a landscape she often worked on, and which is very familiar to her: the Pô Plain, around Reggio Emilia. For this unseen series, Questa Pianura (2004/2014/2015...), she roamed through this wide plain of her childhood, where she still lives and which is still an agricultural territory, even though it has suffered drastic transformations these past fifty years - between agrarian restructuring and intensive suburban development.

To make this « flat country » (Questa Pianura) visible, she took portraits of what is still living there: old farms remains and a few lone trees, that she chose to document through big images with elegant shades of grey. This wide landscape, where the horizon in endless, seems haunted by the mankind history and by a bygone era, told through these abandoned architectures.

In contrapposto, in order to emphasize the ephemeral compared to the eternal: a few color images of the fallow nature punctuate her work.

« It is the Pô Plain. I know this landscape since forever and its changes are closely linked to the economic development of the post-war period. Two series of photographs are intertwined in this project: the first in black and white and large format represents trees and now inhabited farms, most of them in ruins. Their arrangment in space is not aleatory, it reveals their past agricultural, economic and social functions, which existed only forty years ago.

To these « totemic » images of trees and houses are juxtaposed smaller format color images of shores, herbs, cultures, birds, wild flowers, etc., where the perception of the plain is linked to a sensorial, vital, disordered, atmospheric dimension and to the annual nature’s cycle.

From now on I perceive these landscapes as the fragment of a speech whom it is not possible to find the meaning of, even if the disappearing, the loss and the ruin are obvious. Trees deprived of their function are again developing following their natural anchoring and not in a utilitarian perspective anymore. »

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is presenting a solo exhibition by the artist Cory Arcangel, born in Buffalo (USA) in 1978. Arcangel has built up an international reputation since the early 2000s with his innovative performances, videos and computer-generated projections. Arcangel is now considered a pioneer of a generation of artists who have devoted themselves to the archaeology of (computer) technologies. The presentation of the already legendary installation Clouds (2002) in the opening exhibition of the new Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (USA), America is Hard to See, underlines Arcangel's position.

The genealogy of iconic pop music numbers, awareness of the historic character of (electronic) musical instruments, the archiving of music and the mutual permeation of the “pop” and “classical” spheres have become central to Arcangel's work in recent years. Take for instance Arcangel's concert series Dances for the Electric Piano, performed from 2013 to 2015 at venues including ICA London (UK), Berlin Philharmonie (Germany), MUMOK, Vienna (Austria) and the University of Television and Film (HFF) in Munich (Germany). In these compositions Arcangel plays with our collective unconscious knowledge about the sound of the synthesizer Korg M1, popular in 1990s house and techno music, which has become less and less significant for electronic music since the 2000s.

One of the three works in the exhibition, the sculpture PSK (2014), has a similar function: it consists of the drum machine Roland TR-909 with a programmed rhythm which became popular with the song P.S.K. What Does it Mean? (1985) by Philadelphia rapper Schooly D. It is one of the most sampled beats in music history between 1985 and the 1990s. P.S.K. What Does it Mean? is considered one of the most influential songs of early hardcore and gangster rap, with direct textual references to sex, drugs and weapon use – still unusual at that time. The drum machine plays this beat in an endless loop, filling the exhibition room with a monotonous sound. In a public discussion with Hans Ulrich Obrist in Munich in May 2015, Arcangel repeatedly remarked that for him this work was about the protest about forgetting. According to Arcangel, technology is a trend, and his works save outdated technologies from being forgotten. “Maybe nobody would remember Marlboro and the Marlboro man, if it weren't for Richard Prince's work!?” says Arcangel.

Another work in the exhibition is the installation AUDMCRS (2011-15). From 2011 to 2012, Cory Arcangel’s Brooklyn studio archived 839 trance and underground LPs that had been purchased from legendary DJ Joshua Ryan. The AUDMCRS Underground Dance Music Collection of Recorded Sound is an archive of these LPs, presenting all relevant data (format, size, speed, generation, etc.) on each record with an accompanying image of the album’s cover art. The project underlines the personal obsession often involved with collecting, as well as Arcangel’s own interest in preserving a cultural history that relates to his work and life. “It is said that the music we hear as teenagers is, and will always be, the most important music for the rest of our lives” (Arcangel, 2011). “For me, this music is techno – the cheap, voiceless, machine-age disco that became popular in the clubs of Chicago in the late ’80s and from there quickly spread throughout the globe” (Arcangel, 2011). AUDMCRS was shown at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh (USA), DHC/ART Foundation in Montreal (Canada), Herning Museum of Contemporary Art (Denmark) and Reykjavik Art Museum (Iceland).

Kelly Clarkson's hit Since U Been Gone (2004) forms the background for the series of screen prints on silver foil SUBG (2011) also on display in the exhibition: for years, Arcangel has studied the genealogy of what he considers the first number in music history that could be called mainstream punk. For a long time, Arcangel collected CDs of numbers which led to Kelly

Clarkson's music. The screen prints shown in the exhibition are based on the surfaces of selected CDs from this collection.

The exhibition is accompanied by a concert to be held on Sunday, 7 June at 12pm in our Paris Pantin gallery. This is a unique collaboration between Cory Arcangel and the world-famous Ensemble intercontemporain founded in 1976 by Pierre Boulez, which is devoted entirely to contemporary chamber music. Since January 2015 the ensemble has been based at the Philharmonie de Paris in Pantin. The programme will include pieces composed by Cory Arcangel especially for the occasion, as well as works by Claude Debussy, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart/Daniel Glatzel/Johannes Schleiermacher and Anton Webern.

Cory Arcangel received a BA in classical guitar from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio (USA) in 2000 and has since practised as an artist. Arcangel works in a wide range of media, including composition, video, modified video games, performance and the internet. His recent projects include Arcangel Surfware (2014), a merchandise imprint with products including bedsheets, iPad covers and magazines; Working on My Novel (2014), published by Penguin Books, and an extensive research project with a team of computer experts from the Carnegie Mellon Computer Club, in collaboration with the Andy Warhol Museum, the Carnegie Museum, and the Carnegie Studio for Creative Inquiry, to unearth Warhol’s lost digital experiments. Arcangel is the youngest artist since Bruce Naumann to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (USA, 2011). His other recent solo exhibitions include Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Bergamo (Italy, 2015), Reykjavik Art Museum (Iceland, 2015), Herning Museum of Contemporary Art (Denmark, 2014), Fondation DHC/ART Montreal (Canada, 2013), Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (USA, 2013), Barbican Art Gallery, London (UK, 2011), Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (Germany, 2010) and Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (USA, 2010).

Cory Arcangel is the recipient of the 2015 Kino der Kunst Award for the Filmic Œuvre.